(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Late on a warm May night, the rain is coming down in sheets outside the Atlanta Coliseum, a sprawling nightclub in Gwinnett County, a suburban area with one of the largest Hispanic populations in Georgia. Inside, thousands of people are packed onto a dance floor watching Alfredo Ríos, aka El Komander, sashay across the stage. Ríos, a beefy 34-year-old with close-cropped hair and a penchant for oversize sunglasses, is dressed head-to-toe in black.
Midway through his set, his seven-piece band kicks into Leyenda M1, an upbeat ditty fueled by accordion lines, bursts of brass, and the throb of a tuba. The audience sings along lustily: “Se me acabo el parque dos super no alcanzan y a fuego cruzado pelee en desventaja mi cuerpo tendido por la madrugada” (roughly, “I ran out of ammunition because two super caliber pistols is not enough/I fought in a crossfire, at a disadvantage, and by the dawn my body was lying there”). The lyrics hail a “brave lion” who dies in a bloody shootout, promising that his death won’t end this “lost war.” The protagonist is Manuel Torres Félix, aka M1, a top lieutenant in the Sinaloa Cartel who was killed in a firefight with the Mexican army in 2012. Torres Félix was a brutal enforcer known for torturing and decapitating victims. He was reported in the Mexican press to have once presided over 200 murders in a single week.
“As a songwriter, I like those crime stories,” Ríos says through an interpreter, on the phone from his home in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, several weeks after the show. “The music is literature for the ears.” Ríos is a star in the world of regional Mexican music, the most popular radio format among Hispanic Americans, which encompasses norteño, mariachi, grupero, ranchera, and banda. He’s best known for writing and performing narcocorridos, songs in the traditional Mexican folk tradition updated with grisly lyrics detailing the drug trade and its effects.
As Mexico escalates its fight against the cartels—more than 120,000 people have been killed since then-President Felipe Calderón announced a government offensive in 2006, and 2017 was the deadliest year yet—this music has become more explicit, led by Ríos and others in what’s known as movimiento alterado (altered movement). It’s also become more popular, defying the global music industry’s decline: Ríos generally fills 5,000- to 10,000-person venues, playing larger arenas in immigrant-dense cities such as Fresno and Bakersfield, in California’s Central Valley. In Mexico and parts of Central America, he often plays stadiums. His music videos can draw more than 100 million views on YouTube, Jay-Z-level numbers.
“He was real, like a newspaper,” says Omar Valenzuela, who, with his twin brother, Adolfo, signed Ríos to their record label, Twiins, in 2006. El Komander’s success has made Twiins an independent multimedia powerhouse, with a roster of about 10 artists who celebrate brash cartel bosses living glamorous lives and visiting garish brutality on their rivals.
It’s a particularly bad moment, though, to be profiting from glorifying the drug trade, if there’s ever a good one. Several Mexican cities and states have prohibited live performances of narcocorridos and banned them from the radio. Artists have been physically attacked, with violence claiming the lives of dozens of performers in Mexico. In the U.S., narcocorridodistas are in the strange position of exalting an image that conforms to degrading stereotypes exploited by nativist politicians: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” as Donald Trump said. The public’s tastes are shifting, too. The challenge, for Ríos and the Valenzuelas, is to parlay their badass pasts into a mainstream future.
On a Monday not long after the concert in Georgia, the sound of hammers and saws echoes from beyond the lobby of a sunlit storefront in Burbank, Calif. Adolfo pulls up in a burnt-orange Range Rover with “Twiins Motorsports” emblazoned on one side, then comes in to show off the space under construction, a cavernous room that’s being transformed into a video production facility. A smaller, adjacent room houses the label’s social media and online marketing team. The lobby itself is a bright space, with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto a drab strip of small businesses across Burbank Boulevard. The glass shelves are stocked with merch: mostly shirts and hats decorated with the company’s logo or El Komander’s name—the “K” usually shaped like an AK-47—though a few depict imprisoned Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Down the street, the label’s recording studio is also being expanded, to create a new corporate headquarters.
“We started with an online store about four years ago,” Adolfo says, his voice barely cracking a whisper. “I see us expanding to new venues, not as a label, just as a brand. Fashion, food, nightclubs.” So far, perhaps their biggest outside venture is a narco-themed taqueria, Tacos Los Desvelados, in the small working-class city of Maywood, just south of Los Angeles.
Born in Sinaloa in 1976, the brothers came to music via their father, also named Adolfo, who played clarinet and saxophone in respected bandas. “They played for all these cartels,” says the junior Adolfo, name-checking bosses such as Guzmán, Rafael Caro Quintero, and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García.
The corrido tradition in which the elder Valenzuela played stretches back more than a century; the musicians originally functioned as town criers, spreading word of Mexican Revolution battles and other newsworthy incidents. The drug trade started making its way into songs around 1973, when Los Tigres del Norte released what’s often considered to be the first modern narcocorrido, Contrabando y Traición, about a couple driving to California with marijuana stuffed inside their tires. Groups such as Los Tucanes de Tijuana and Los Invasores de Nuevo León soon added narcocorridos to their repertoires, but drug balladeers were mostly a small segment of Mexican music until the early 1990s, when Chalino Sánchez emerged.
Sánchez was an undocumented immigrant who moved from rural Sinaloa to California and worked on farms, in kitchens, and as a small-time dealer. By the mid-1980s, he had a side gig writing corridos for local toughs and regular folks; often, they wanted to memorialize a relative lost to gang or drug violence. Sánchez began recording the songs himself, attracting a following among his fellow immigrants. In January 1992, he was shot in the side while performing in Coachella, Calif. He drew his own pistol and returned fire. He survived, but months later, following a show in Culiacán, he was killed, execution-style, and his body was dumped in a canal. No one has been arrested for the murder, but theories of motive abound: a violent reaction to one of his narcocorridos, a dispute over missing cocaine or a woman, a cartel-ordered hit. His death enhanced his music’s popularity, especially among young Mexican Americans who loved gangsta rap and dismissed Mexican music as fusty. Suddenly, they had a homegrown outlaw.
Mindful of the dangers, Adolfo and Omar’s father wanted his kids to focus their ambitions elsewhere. “The life he lived was very dangerous,” Omar says on the phone from Sinaloa. “A lot of musicians died in Culiacán.” But by age 12 the brothers were attending music school. Adolfo took up the trombone and Omar the clarinet. When they were 15, the family moved to the U.S., partly because their father feared they’d get entangled with the shadier side of the Mexican music business. The brothers attended Theodore Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles, where they played a lot of jazz and salsa, and Omar won a music scholarship to the University of Southern California. They also landed gigs as session musicians and in backing bands for local Mexican performers.
“We used to play for Chalino,” Adolfo says. “I remember him being always surrounded by mafia people. He’d hire us to play and be sitting the whole time, just drinking. Then he’d sing one song and go into the restroom to do cocaine or something.” The brothers quickly graduated to producing, working with Latin music stars such as Paulina Rubio, Thalía, and Calle 13. They founded Twiins in 2000 as a production company, working initially, with some frustration, for major-label artists. “Many had no talent but were supported by a big company,” Omar says. “Then when new talent began to come to us, I loved what they were doing, but nobody would sign them.”
They began releasing music themselves, and around 2006 a cousin who owned a clothing store introduced them to Ríos, who was then living in California. “My cousin was calling me saying, ‘I have somebody that works for me that comes from Sinaloa, that has no papers, and says he wants to do music,’ ” Omar recalls. “I told him, ‘Please don’t bother me. I’m busy.’ ” Eventually he relented and invited Ríos in to sing for him and his brother. “We were blown away,” Omar says. “He’s not that much of a singer, but he was real. He writes whatever he feels about whatever was going on in Culiacán. Mexico at that time was really dangerous, as it is now, but you never heard people [singing] before about decapitating.”
The Valenzuelas rechristened Ríos El Komander—the name nabbed from someone else’s song—and produced a single, El Katch, a jaunty, horn-fueled ode to the narco lifestyle. Violence dances nimbly through the lyrics in double-edged lines such as “Celebrando con tiros al viento” (“Celebrating with shots to the wind”). The song—and the video, which plays like a low-budget commercial for Mexico’s underbelly—cataloged the rewards of the drug trade: Land Rovers, Buchanan’s whisky, Armani clothing.
El Katch became Twiins’ first hit, and the brothers followed up by signing acts such as Los 2 Primos, La Edición de Culiacán, and Las Buknas de Culiacán. (The last group actually hails from Southern California.) The Valenzuelas deliberately branded this a “movement”—movimiento alterado—in hopes of capturing the generational shift they sensed among Hispanic immigrants. “It’s not like before, when they were like, ‘I’m going to work hard like my parents,’ ” Adolfo says. “This new generation has learned they can make more money, have luxuries, be bigger or better than their parents. They all love that feeling of power, which had never been felt before in Mexican music. Because before it was love and sadness. It was never about power.” Their own father eventually came around to his sons’ business. Now, Adolfo says, “when I ask him, ‘So you played for this guy and this guy?’ he’ll tell me, ‘This guy was cool,’ ‘This one was a dick.’ ”
With the label up and running, Omar moved back to Culiacán to open a satellite office for booking concerts in Mexico. “We actually flipped a coin to see who was going to move,” Adolfo recalls. “He lost.” Today, Adolfo says, half of the business is there and half in the U.S., though they have more employees in Mexico, in part because labor is significantly cheaper. They also generally prefer to have artists debut there, to give even the American ones a more authentic feel.
Twiins has paid a lot of attention to social media, which has translated into tens of millions of YouTube views and real money. The video for Sanguinarios del M1 (Bloodthirsty Men of M1), a 2011 collaboration among El Komander and other Twiins artists, has been viewed more than 33 million times. The video for El Komander’s 2012 hit, Cuernito Armani, in which Ríos plays an AK-slinging singer-playboy-cartel boss, has been viewed more than 56 million times. The Valenzuelas won’t provide exact figures, but according to Adolfo, Twiins makes “millions of dollars in revenue from live performances and digital outlets, millions from YouTube, millions in sponsorships, thousands in retail merchandise.” He adds that this is more than similar companies, because Twiins doesn’t share revenue with major labels. By contrast, DEL Records—whose Pasadena, Calif.-born, Sinaloa-raised star, Gerardo Ortiz, has been, along with Ríos, the face of movimiento alterado—has a distribution deal with Sony Corp.
“The way I see it, I’m doing music. I’m not doing war. I put out whatever kids are singing on the streets”
Twiins’ musicians have so far avoided the bloodshed that has struck artists from other labels over the past decade. In late 2006, Valentín Elizalde, a regional Mexican star who’d sung tunes praising the Sinaloa Cartel and antagonizing its rivals, was gunned down by members of the Gulf Cartel’s armed wing, Los Zetas. Since then dozens more artists have been murdered, and many more have been threatened, kidnapped, shot, or tortured. In 2011, following a concert in Mexico, an attacker shot up an SUV that Ortiz was riding in, killing his driver and business manager. In February 2017, a banner appeared in a Tijuana neighborhood threatening to kill Los Nuevos Rebeldes, a popular group signed to DEL, if they performed their songs praising local cartel figures. In March, Rolando Arellano Sánchez, the guitarist for Grupo Contacto, was murdered in Tijuana, weeks after the group’s manager had been warned by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel to stop celebrating the Sinaloa Cartel.
The Valenzuelas’ quick rise did fuel some dangerous rumors. “Everyone was saying El Chapo was funding this,” Adolfo says. “We were scared. There was so much talk about it, we were like, ‘Hopefully, nothing bad is going to happen to us.’ We only wanted to make music.” In 2011, Omar admitted to the Associated Press that Twiins had, on occasion, asked Sinaloa Cartel bosses for permission before releasing music about their activities. Otherwise, a few of Twiins’ artists write corridos on commission and play parties for narcos, but the violence has remained mostly peripheral. “We were going to do a concert in Monterrey, and that morning they found some bodies in the venue,” Adolfo recalls. “That’s the cartels trying to intimidate people.” They went ahead with the event, but the label and its artists take precautions. “Komander, there are cities where the Zetas are, he doesn’t touch there,” Adolfo says. Omar says he tries “not to be outside at night” in Sinaloa and avoids some of the label’s own events there.
The real-world associations between the music and the drug trade have led Mexican officials to largely ban narcocorridos from the airwaves and to sanction dozens of stations under a 1961 law that prohibits “exaltation of violence or crime.” In 2011 the state of Sinaloa made it illegal for any bar, nightclub, or restaurant to play songs glorifying drug trafficking. “The rhythm they dance to is that of the violence that harms many families in Mexico,” wrote Alejandro Poiré, a national security spokesman, on a government website.
Since then, the states of Chihuahua and Coahuila, as well as several smaller cities and municipalities, have passed similar prohibitions. El Komander was fined $8,000 for breaking the Chihuahuan law in 2013, and Los Tigres del Norte were fined $25,000 last year for contravening the same ban. Ortiz, meanwhile, was arrested in Guadalajara in 2016 for “criminal exaltation” stemming from the video for his hit Fuiste Mía, which depicts the singer shooting a man in the head, tying up a woman, tossing her into the trunk of his car, and setting her on fire. And just last month, El Komander was prohibited from playing narcocorridos at a performance in Culiacán and denied a performance permit by municipal officials in Mazatlan, who claimed his music incites crime.
Moral arguments against narcocorridos don’t sway Adolfo, though. “In Mexico, a lot of people were telling us, ‘We’re in a war right now. Why are you singing this? It’s making things worse,’ ” he says. “The way I see it, I’m doing music. I’m not doing war. I put out whatever kids are singing on the streets or the internet. … Artists, just like journalists, put out whatever is on people’s minds. That’s my job.”
Lately, that has meant a more political tack. In 2016, El Komander released songs that centered on immigration (Desaparecido) and Mexican American pride (El Mexicano Americano), with a few grim lyrical twists. In the former, a border crosser is used as an unwitting drug mule and executed in the desert; the latter includes sly references to cocaine and AK-47s.
Edgar Quintero, an American-born singer and songwriter who recently left Las Buknas de Culiacán to pursue a solo career for Twiins, says the Trump era has brought a palpable change to the energy at his shows. “Right now, nobody likes the president,” he says, sitting in a park in Maywood near where he grew up. “At my gigs, whenever I say, ‘F--- Donald Trump!’ they love it. They go crazy. If politicians are not doing their job keeping the communities and citizens happy, the musician is going to take advantage and put them on the spot.”
It’s possible to see the alterado movement as a defiant howl from fans who’ve frequently felt marginalized, threatened, and even emasculated by the immigration debate on the U.S. side of the border and by the raging war on the other side. Certainly to many, the image of the swaggering, machine-gun-toting, Range Rover-driving badass defying the law with impunity is preferable to that of the impoverished campesino cowering in fear of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids or cartel enforcers. “Narcocorridos appeal to that person who wants to go out and be a narco Friday and Saturday, and then has to go to work on Monday,” Quintero says.
The question for the most ambitious of the narcocorrido singers is whether music based on those sentiments can lead to mainstream stardom. “El Komander and Gerardo Ortiz really made a name for themselves in that alterado subgenre, but over the last few years both have become much more commercial in nature,” says Ismar Santa Cruz, vice president for radio content and strategy at Univision Communications Inc. “Ortiz is a superstar now because he started coming out with these songs that were more ballad-y. El Komander, same thing.” The turn from testosterone-heavy lyrics toward romantic ballads is a concession that an artist who wants a durable career needs female fans, too.
The Valenzuelas acknowledge some concern for the cyclical nature of musical trends. Four or five years ago, seemingly every regional Mexican artist was jumping on the bandwagon, but interest has leveled off some. The label’s next emerging star, Cuitla Vega, is a straight-up pop balladeer. And when I reach Adolfo on the phone in mid-August, he’s on the set of a film he’s producing. “The market is too saturated with bad corridos. So there’s room for new things now.”
Ríos is aware of the pitfalls, too. “The term ‘narcocorrido’ bothers me,” he says. “El Komander sings about horses, about cockfights.” His resistance to being the face of narcocorridos led him a few years ago to announce his retirement from music. “He wrote a song named I Quit,” Adolfo says, chuckling at the memory. “ ‘El Komander. Coming soon: I Quit.” The retirement didn’t stick, but the frustration was genuine. “People think we only sing corridos, and that’s not right,” Ríos says. “But certain topics are forbidden by the radio, so corridos go onto the internet and social media, and romantic music goes to the radio to enlarge the project.”
Ríos says the response to his more mainstream material has been “excellent,” but back at the studio in Burbank, his label boss says El Komander’s core fans have been lukewarm. The artist’s conundrum mirrors Twiins’ own. “Komander comes out with love songs, and people don’t care,” Adolfo says with a shrug. “They’re like, ‘No, give me corridos.’”
To contact the author of this story: David Peisner in New York at david.peisner@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Miranda Purves at mpurves5@bloomberg.net, Jeremy Keehn
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